Those Awful June Unemployment Numbers Are A Candy-Coated Fantasy

On Friday, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report was released, showing that unemployment rose to 9.2% in June, with only 18,000 new jobs added to the economy.The BLS also revised the already dismal job creation numbers for April and May down by 44,000 jobs.

These “downward revisions” are a standard feature of labor reports nowadays.The numbers for any given month always seem to be “revised” a few months later, always for the worse.This raises the understandable suspicion that the initial unemployment report has been massaged by the BLS to keep the headlines a bit less apocalyptic upon its release.

Now for the really bad news: that 18,000 gain announced by the government yesterday isn’t real.

For one thing, the number of jobs increased in June only because the Labor Department simultaneously revised downward the number of jobs that existed in this country during May. It’s like moving the fences at Citi Field so the Mets players can hit more home runs. It might make Jose Reyes feel better, but it doesn’t actually make him more powerful.

Without the fence-moving operation in the May employment report, the June number — yesterday’s number — would have shown a decline of 26,000 jobs.

In other words, the number of jobs created during April and May wasn’t that much lower than the initial totals reported, which were awful in May and mediocre in April… mainly because McDonald’s went on a hiring spree in April.Instead, the government just shoveled thousands of job offerings from April and May to June, in order to prevent the media from running a headline that screamed “NO JOB CREATION IN JUNE – 26,000 JOBS LOST INSTEAD.”

But wait, there’s more!

Then there’s another problem with June’s employment report. Included in the 18,000 headline number is a guesstimate that 131,000 jobs were created by newly formed — and, therefore, invisible — companies.

If you want to send your resume to one of these companies, don’t bother. They probably don’t exist, and neither do the jobs the government thinks they are creating. These figments of the imagination of the Labor Department’s computers will probably disappear when the numbers are checked early next year.

So a lot of the “job creation” in June was simply made up out of thin air.It’s a “guesstimate” with no basis in reality.

In other words, it’s a lie.An absolute fraud.

Perhaps some of those “guesstimate” jobs from hypothetical new companies will eventually be realized, but wouldn’t it be more logical – and more in keeping with the kind of accounting standards demanded of the private sector – to report the real, concrete number of jobs that were verifiably created now, and revise that figure upward in the future, if new business formation resulted in some jobs the government wasn’t able to count during the initial June report?

Take away the 44,000 jobs nipped from previous months, and the 131,000 hypothetical jobs created by imaginary companies, and you have the cold, real truth behind the fraudulent statistics released by the government to manipulate media headlines: The United States of America lost 157,000 jobs in June.

Since 120,000 jobs per month are needed to keep pace with young people entering the workforce, that means we are 277,000 jobs short of real employment growth.

One of the many reasons it is foolish to entrust politicians with control of the economy is something that too much of the public allows itself to forget about politicians: they lie.No private company could get away with releasing the kind of cooked statistics the government publishes to generate favorable, or in this case less unfavorable, headlines.The management and accounting staff of such a company would be imprisoned.

There is no “recovery,” and there never has been.It’s a weak and fraudulent narrative, created by the Obama Administration with the kind of performance reports that Enron used to produce.